Why we don’t talk about “Augmented Reality”...

Let's face it; Augmented Reality isn't the most comfortable combination of words. It sounds like something from Weird Science...

That’s because it’s a phrase that was dreamt up by very clever people, in very dark rooms in a research lab back in the 1980s.

“Augmented Reality” means nothing to the man on the street, your friend at the bar or an average consumer. It isn’t, and won’t be, part of the common vernacular (a bit like the word vernacular in fact).

For this reason we are creating a much more friendly language to describe the act of using your mobile device to bring physical things to life with digital content. We call it zapping. To zap. I zap, you zap, he zaps.

Well that’s the verb sorted, now how about the noun. It certainly isn’t an “AR”… which brings to mind a hospital. They’re zaps.

Injecting a sense of playfulness into the way we talk about it sits with our overall strategy of making life more fun, one zap at a time.

So “Augmented Reality” you can stay in your research lab with your friend “AR” – we’ll stick with zaps and zapping thanks.